Plasmids are a major type of mobile genetic elements (MGEs) that mediate horizontal gene transfer. The stable maintenance of plasmids plays a critical role in the functions and survival for microbial populations. However, predicting and controlling plasmid persistence and abundance in complex microbial communities remain challenging. Computationally, this challenge arises from the combinatorial explosion associated with the conventional modeling framework. Recently, a plasmid‐centric framework (PCF) has been developed to overcome this computational bottleneck. This framework enables the derivation of a simple (...) metric, the persistence potential, to predict plasmid persistence and abundance. Here, we discuss how PCF can be extended to account for plasmid interactions. We also discuss how such model‐guided predictions of plasmid fates can benefit from the development of new experimental tools and data‐driven computational methods. (shrink)

The shortage of organs for transplantation by its nature prompts ethical dilemmas. For example, although there is an imperative to save human life and reduce suffering by maximising the supply of vital organs, there is an equally important obligation to ensure that the process by which we increase the supply respects the rights of all stakeholders. In a relatively unexamined practice in the USA, organs are procured from unrepresented decedents without their express consent. Unrepresented decedents have no known healthcare wishes (...) or advance care planning document; they also lack a surrogate. The Revised Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 2006 sends a mixed message about the procurement of organs from this patient population and there are hospitals that authorise donation. In addition, in adopting the RUAGA, some states included provisions that clearly allow organ procurement from unrepresented decedents. An important unanswered question is whether this practice meets the canons of ethical permissibility. The current Brief Report presents two principled approaches to the topic as a way of highlighting some of the complexities involved. Concluding remarks offer suggestions for future research and discussion. (shrink)

By virtue of what do alarm calls and facial expressions carry natural information? The answer I defend in this paper is that they carry natural information by virtue of changing the probabilities of various states of affairs, relative to background data. The Probabilistic Difference Maker Theory of natural information that I introduce here is inspired by Dretske's [1981] seminal analysis of natural information, but parts ways with it by eschewing the requirements that information transmission must be nomically underwritten, mind-independent, and (...) knowledge-yielding. PDMT includes both a qualitative account of information transmission and a measure of natural information in keeping with the basic principles of Shannon's communication theory and Bayesian confirmation theory. It also includes a new account of the informational content of a signal, understood as the combination of the incremental and overall support that the signal provides for all states of affairs at the source. Finally, I compare and.. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to question the nature of the socio-anthropological approach in Lefort’s thought. The author explores the complex relationship between Lefort and the Durkheimian French school of sociology in four stages: in the first, he shows Lefort as a sociologist ‘worthy of its name’ or, in other words, a sociologist interested in questioning the ‘institution of the social’. In the second, he focuses on the disturbing elements that Lefort introduces: the political and the division into the (...) French sociological approach. In the third stage, he focuses his attention on the sociological approach in Lefort’s way of thinking about democratic society. Finally, he concludes by referring to Lefort’s apparent opposition between philosophy and social sciences – and the errors that this may have engendered – in order to demonstrate the continuity of Lefort’s sociological approach. (shrink)

This book offers a comprehensive account of vitalism and the Romantic philosophy of nature. The author explores the rise of biology as a unified science in Germany by reconstructing the history of the notion of “vital force,” starting from the mid-eighteenth through the early nineteenth century. Further, he argues that Romantic Naturphilosophie played a crucial role in the rise of biology in Germany, especially thanks to its treatment of teleology. In fact, both post-Kantian philosophers and naturalists were guided by teleological (...) principles in defining the object of biological research. The book begins by considering the problem of generation, focusing on the debate over the notion of “formative force.” Readers are invited to engage with the epistemological status of this formative force, i.e. the question of the principle behind organization. The second chapter provides a reconstruction of the physiology of vital forces as it was elaborated in the mid- to late-eighteenth century by the group of physicians and naturalists known as the “Göttingen School.” Readers are shown how these authors developed an understanding of the animal kingdom as a graded series of organisms with increasing functional complexity. Chapter three tracks the development of such framework in Romantic Naturphilosophie. The author introduces the reader to the problem of classification, showing how Romantic philosophers of nature regarded classification as articulated by a unified plan that connects all living forms with one another, relying on the idea of living nature as a universal organism. In the closing chapter, this analysis shows how the three instances of pre-biological discourse on living beings – theory of generation, physiology and natural history – converged to form the consolidated disciplinary matrix of a general biology. The book offers an insightful read for all scholars interested in classical German philosophy, especially those researching the philosophy of nature, as well as the history and philosophy of biology. (shrink)

Modeling law search and retrieval as prediction problems has recently emerged as a predominant approach in law intelligence. Focusing on the law article retrieval task, we present a deep learning framework named LamBERTa, which is designed for civil-law codes, and specifically trained on the Italian civil code. To our knowledge, this is the first study proposing an advanced approach to law article prediction for the Italian legal system based on a BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) learning framework, which has (...) recently attracted increased attention among deep learning approaches, showing outstanding effectiveness in several natural language processing and learning tasks. We define LamBERTa models by fine-tuning an Italian pre-trained BERT on the Italian civil code or its portions, for law article retrieval as a classification task. One key aspect of our LamBERTa framework is that we conceived it to address an extreme classification scenario, which is characterized by a high number of classes, the few-shot learning problem, and the lack of test query benchmarks for Italian legal prediction tasks. To solve such issues, we define different methods for the unsupervised labeling of the law articles, which can in principle be applied to any law article code system. We provide insights into the explainability and interpretability of our LamBERTa models, and we present an extensive experimental analysis over query sets of different type, for single-label as well as multi-label evaluation tasks. Empirical evidence has shown the effectiveness of LamBERTa, and also its superiority against widely used deep-learning text classifiers and a few-shot learner conceived for an attribute-aware prediction task. (shrink)

Though widely derided by popular psychologists and self-help writers as an emotionally toxic and destructive response, blame has many defenders among contemporary moral philosophers. Blaming wrongdoers has been thought to express deep commitment to moral values and norms, to be intimately bound up with practices of holding others responsible, and to be an important exercise of moral agency. In this paper I push against the grain of such defenses of blame just enough to articulate what seems right in the more (...) popular lines of critique. I distinguish between blame as a reactive attitude and blaming as a speech act, and argue that some disagreement over the value of blame can be explained by the fact that blaming, as a speech act, takes several distinct forms. Critiques of blame, I suggest, properly target what we might call judgmental or strongly verdictive blaming, the sort of blaming that passes judgment on the wrongdoer him- or herself, and treats him or her as deserving of the blamer’s hostile or “punishing” reactions. This kind of blaming, I argue, tends to foreclose engagement in further moral dialogue with wrongdoers, an effect that is particularly destructive in therapeutic contexts. In such contexts, it is often more appropriate—and more constructive—to hold others answerable without blaming them in the strongly verdictive sense. I argue, moreover, that strongly verdictive blame may be similarly destructive outside of straightforwardly therapeutic contexts, and I challenge the idea that there is in any case a sharp or clear dividing line between therapeutic and non-therapeutic responses to wrongdoers. Holding answerable in a non-judgmental mode is a response that may have a therapeutic dimension, but it nonetheless engages a wrongdoer as a moral peer and partner in moral dialogue. This account of non-judgmental answerability, I suggest, captures much of what moral philosophers have taken to be valuable about blame, while accommodating the insights of those who criticize its more toxic forms. (shrink)

This book addresses two related questions that have first arisen in Toulmin’s seminal book on the uses of argument. The first question is the one of the relationship between the semantic analysis of modality and the structure of arguments. The second question is the one of the distinctive place, or role, of modality in the fundamental structure of arguments. These two questions concern how modality, as a semantic category, relates to the fundamental structure of arguments. The book addresses modality and (...) argumentation also according to another perspective by looking at how different linguistic modal expressions may be taken as argumentative indicators. It explores the role of modal expressions as argumentative indicators by using the Italian modal system as a case study. At the same time, it uses predictions/forecasts in the business-financial daily press to investigate the relation between modality and the context of argumentation. (shrink)

Political theorists aiming to articulate normative standards for the EU have almost entirely focused on whether or not the EU suffers from a ‘democratic deficit'. Almost nothing has been written, by contrast, on one of the central values underpinning European integration since at least the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), namely solidarity. What kinds of principles, policies, and ideals should an affirmation of solidarity commit us to? Put another way: what norms of socioeconomic justice ought to apply to the (...) EU? This is not an empirical or narrowly legal question. We are not trying to gauge the degree of attachment there currently is in the EU by, for example, citing the latest Eurobarometer poll. We are also not attempting to state the implicit rationale followed by the Court of Justice in its recent ‘solidarity’ jurisprudence, let alone trying to fix what the Commission might mean by it. In this article, I ask the more fundamental question underlying both the legal and the empirical questions: What principles of social solidarity ought to apply between states and citizens of the emerging European polity? This question has rarely been asked or answered by political theorists in an EU context, so we are entering largely uncharted territory. The article develops a tripartite model of EU solidarity in Section 2, and then applies it to the case of free movement of persons in Section 3. (shrink)

In ancient Greece, philosophers developed new and dazzling ideas about divinity, drawing on the deep well of poetry, myth, and religious practices even as they set out to construct new theological ideas. Andrea Nightingale argues that Plato shared in this culture and appropriates specific Greek religious discourses and practices to present his metaphysical philosophy. In particular, he uses the Greek conception of divine epiphany - a god appearing to humans - to claim that the Forms manifest their divinity epiphanically (...) to the philosopher, with the result that the human soul becomes divine by contemplating these Forms and the cosmos. Nightingale also offers a detailed discussion of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the Orphic Mysteries and shows how these mystery religions influenced Plato's thinking. This book offers a robust challenge to the idea that Plato is a secular thinker. (shrink)

Autonomy, at least in one sense of the term, requires sovereign authority over one’s choices and actions. In this paper, I argue that such authority is relational in at least two respects. First, I argue that sovereign authority may be shared – and, indeed, must be shareable – with others through the exercise of normative powers. Second, I argue that normative powers are themselves relational powers, powers that depend in part on the recognition of agents as having an equal basic (...) authority to exercise such powers in the first place. Drawing on feminist speech-act analyses of silencing and subordination, I examine how failures of uptake for exercises of normative powers compromise personal autonomy. (shrink)

In fourth-century Greece, the debate over the nature of philosophy generated a novel claim: that the highest form of wisdom is theoria, the rational 'vision' of metaphysical truths. This 2004 book offers an original analysis of the construction of 'theoretical' philosophy in fourth-century Greece. In the effort to conceptualise and legitimise theoretical philosophy, the philosophers turned to a venerable cultural practice: theoria. In this practice, an individual journeyed abroad as an official witness of sacralized spectacles. This book examines the philosophic (...) appropriation and transformation of theoria, and analyses the competing conceptions of theoretical wisdom in fourth-century philosophy. By tracing the link between traditional and philosophic theoria, this book locates the creation of theoretical philosophy in its historical context, analysing theoria as a cultural and an intellectual practice. It develops a new, interdisciplinary approach, drawing on philosophy, history and literary studies. (shrink)

I discuss an interpretation, recently proposed by Mark Siderits, of the claim that within the Buddhist tradition the self is a convenient fiction. I subsequently propose a novel approach to fictionalism in contemporary metaphysics, outline an application of such an approach to the case of the self and then specify one version of fictionalism combined with some basic tenets of Buddhism.

Individuals with Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) have difficulties in the recollection of past experiences (Episodic Memory). Accumulating evidence suggests that they might have also difficulties in the ability to imagine potential future scenarios (Episodic Future Thinking, EFT) and in narrative generation skills. This investigation aimed to determine 1) whether impairments of EFT can be identified in a large cohort of children with high functioning ASD using a task with minimal narrative demands; and 2) if such impairments are related to the (...) ability to generate a narrative's scenario. 77 children with high-functioning ASD and 77 children with typical development were recruited for the study. The two groups were balanced for age, level of formal education, and IQ. EFT was assessed by administering a task with minimal narrative demands, whereas narrative generation skills were assessed with three tasks requiring children to generate past, middle or future episodes in a narrative discourse. With respect to control participants, a subgroup of children with ASD had impaired EFT skills and also showed significant impairments in the ability to generate adequate narratives. On the contrary, participants with spared EFT had normal performance on the narrative generation task. Interestingly, EFT skills predicted narrative generation abilities in both groups. The results of this study support the hypothesis that EFT may be impaired in some but not all children with ASD and of a relation between difficulties with EFT and impairments in the process of narrative generation. The assessment of EFT should employ tasks that do not require narrative production, as children with impaired EFT may also have reduced narrative skills. (shrink)

This study assessed the attitudes and needs of physicians and health professional staff at a tertiary care hospital in Canada regarding the introduction of physician assisted dying (PAD) during 2015–16. This research aimed to develop an understanding of the wishes, concerns and hopes of stakeholders related to handling requests for PAD; to determine what supports/structures/resources health care professionals (HCP) require in order to ensure high quality and compassionate care for patients requesting PAD, and a supportive environment for all healthcare providers (...) across the moral spectrum. This study constituted a mixed methods design with a qualitative descriptive approach for the study’s qualitative component. A total of 303 HCPs working in a tertiary care hospital completed an online survey and 64 HCPs working in hospital units with high mortality rates participated in 8 focus group discussions. Both focus group and survey data coalesced around several themes to support the implementation of PAD following the decriminalization of this practice: the importance of high quality care; honoring moral diversity; supporting values (such as autonomy, privacy, beneficence); and developing resources, including collaboration with palliative care, education, policies and a specialized team. This study provided the foundational evidence to support the development of the PAD program described in other papers in this collection, and can be a model for gathering evidence from stakeholders to inform the implementation of PAD in any healthcare organization. (shrink)

Several scholars have recognized the limitations of theories of moral reasoning in explaining moral behavior. They have argued that moral behavior may also be influenced by moral identity, or how central morality is to one’s sense of self. This idea has been supported by findings that people who exemplify moral behavior tend to place more importance on moral traits when defining their self-concepts (Colby & Damon, 1995). This paper takes the next step of examining individual variation in a construct highly (...) associated with immoral behavior — psychopathy. In Study 1, we test the hypothesis that individuals with a greater degree of psychopathic traits have a weaker moral identity. Within a large online sample, we found that individuals who scored higher on a measure of psychopathic traits were less likely to base their self-concepts on moral traits. In Study 2, we test whether this reduced sense of moral identity can be attributed to differences in moral judgment, which is another factor that could influence immoral behavior. Our results indicated that the reduced sense of moral identity among more psychopathic individuals was independent of variation in moral judgment. These results suggest that individuals with psychopathic traits may display immoral behavior partially because they do not construe their personal identities in moral terms. (shrink)

German universities come under fire: in contemporary political discourse they are considered to be antiquated, inefficient and unfit for international competition. Accordingly, the German government implemented an extensive program of reforms. Following the so‐called ‘Sorbonne Declaration’, the universities shall become part of an European higher education system with comparable and compatible structures. With the focus on the field of academic teaching and learning, this essay discusses the way of defining these activities in a new, entrepreneurial way, and the implications of (...) this process within the university. The reflections lead to the thesis that the actual reforms ask for new forms of critique, because the neoliberal offer of marketable ways to teach and to learn makes the enduring asymmetry of power relations within the educational field invisible, endangers the democratic character of the university and trivializes education. (shrink)

Both Aristotle and Kant note that the highest form of friendship enables individuals of good virtue to reveal themselves to one another. I argue that Aristotle and Kant emphasize complementary aspects of self-disclosure in friendship: whereas Kant acknowledges the inherent value of self-disclosure in friendship, Aristotle suggests that joint perception in friendship is instrumentally valuable in the acquisition of self-knowledge. I also argue that although Aristotle has a more developed account of friendship, Kant advances a superior account of self-disclosure in (...) friendship in his later remarks on friendship in the Metaphysical Principles of Virtue. (shrink)

This volume addresses three major themes regarding recipes: their nature and identity; their relationship to territory, producers, consumers and places of production. The first part looks at taxonomies of recipes, the relationship between recipes and their source, and how recipes have changed over time, including case studies that look at unsourced recipes through to recipes for foods that are very highly processed. The second part identifies the constitutive relationships that characterize recipes, between territory, producers, consumers, places and spaces of production. (...) The third part studies the values and norms guiding the naming, production and consumption of recipes, scrutinising the cultural appropriation of recipes, how to stake authority in claiming a recipe, and the interplay between aesthetics and ethics in recipe making. With contributors ranging across disciplines including philosophy, law and history, and including established academics such as Carolyn Korsmeyer and food writers such as Rachel Laudan this volume will be of vital importance for those looking to understand how archival material forms our understanding of eating habits and culture throughout history. (shrink)

Recent feminist accounts of autonomy have focused both on autonomous agents’ relationships to others and on their self-regarding attitudes or self-relations. This chapter focuses on the attitude of practical self-care, arguing that autonomous agents must care about themselves in a sense that amounts to caring about their practical reasons. While self-care is primarily a self-relation, it also implies a form of interpersonal relationality. Caring about one’s reasons requires caring about intersubjective assessments thereof, and the relation of self-care thus implies openness (...) to the reasons of others and a disposition to hold oneself answerable for one’s identity-constituting concerns. (shrink)

Previous studies of auditory statistical learning have typically presented learners with sequential structural information that is uniformly distributed across the entire exposure corpus. Here we present learners with nonuniform distributions of structural information by altering the organization of trisyllabic nonsense words at midstream. When this structural change was unmarked by low‐level acoustic cues, or even when cued by a pitch change, only the first of the two structures was learned. However, both structures were learned when there was an explicit cue (...) to the midstream change or when exposure to the second structure was tripled in duration. These results demonstrate that successful extraction of the structure in an auditory statistical learning task reduces the ability to learn subsequent structures, unless the presence of two structures is marked explicitly or the exposure to the second is quite lengthy. The mechanisms by which learners detect and use changes in distributional information to maintain sensitivity to multiple structures are discussed from both behavioral and computational perspectives. (shrink)

This article expands Michel Foucault’s schema of the human ‘technologies’—those of production, signification, power and technologies of the self —to posit the existence of a fifth technological modality described here as technologies of the other. This refers to techniques and practices that facilitate the autonomy, not of the self, but of another person or persons. The specificity of these techniques of care, I argue, is obscured in Foucault’s work in so far as they are subsumed as a ‘position’ within the (...) technologies of the self, rather than afforded the status of a separate mode of technological practice in their own right. This not only misrecognizes their qualitative difference—the special kind of human ‘making’ they entail—but also allows for the dubious claim of an ‘ontological primacy’ of self-care when this is actually preceded by, and dependent upon, prior other-care. As one potential candidate or fragment of this alternative technological lineage, the paper revisits the writings on the psychoanalytic technique of empathy elaborated in the British Independent tradition of Donald Winnicott. It explores how these empathetic techniques engage in an ethics of ‘other-fashioning’—a necessary prelude to the emergence of capacities of autonomous ‘self-fashioning’—and suggests that such empathy can neither be encapsulated fully under the rubric of technologies of the self, nor read as isomorphic with the technologies of power. (shrink)

This paper argues that God's immanent causation and Spinoza's account of activity as adequate causation (of finite modes) do not always go together in Spinoza's thought. We show that there is good reason to doubt that this is the case in Spinoza's early Short Treatise on God, Man and His Well‐being. In the Short Treatise, Spinoza defends an account of God's immanent causation without fully endorsing the account of activity as adequate causation that he will later introduce in the Ethics (...) (E3def2). We turn to an examination of how God's immanent causation relates to the activity of finite things in the Ethics. We consider two ways to think about the link between God, seen as immanent cause, and the activity of finite things: namely, in terms of entailment and in terms of production. We argue that the productive model is most promising for understanding the way in which the activity of finite things and God's immanent causality are connected in Spinoza's (mature) philosophy. (shrink)

According to simulation or shared-substrates models of emotion recognition, our ability to recognize the emotions expressed by other individuals relies, at least in part, on processes that internally simulate the same emotional state in ourselves. The term “emotional expressions” is nearly synonymous, in many people's minds, with facial expressions of emotion. However, vocal prosody and whole-body cues also convey emotional information. What is the relationship between these various channels of emotional communication? We first briefly review simulation models of emotion recognition, (...) and then discuss neuroscientific evidence related to these models, including studies using facial expressions, whole-body cues, and vocal prosody. We conclude by discussing these data in the context of simulation and shared-substrates models of emotion recognition. (shrink)

This essay attempts to interrogate the distinct character of Peter Sloterdijk’s declaration of the absolute imperative that concludes his work, You Must Change Your Life, by contextualizing it within the development of his notion of anthropotechnics. In particular, the essays examine the claim that his is a new and unprecedented form of the absolute imperative that is alone able to address, in an effective way, the contemporary global crises that are confronting us now. The first sections trace out the ways (...) in which this new imperative differs from previous forms of the imperative, including the categorical, the aesthetic, and the existential-ontological. The latter sections then discuss how the new form of the imperative is connected to Sloterdijk’s radical attempt at a rethinking of the essence of the human as always already technological, which is the very project of anthropotechnics. This leads finally to a discussion of Sloterdijk’s polemical engagement with Heidegger’s question concerning technology, in which I trace out his attempt at a sweeping translation of Heidegger’s notion of enframing [Gestell] into enhousing [Gehäuse] and the consequences thereof. (shrink)

The final part of Kitarō Nishida’s first major work, An Inquiry into the Good (Zen no kenkyū 善の研究) (henceforth IG), is devoted to religion, famously defined in the preface to the book as the “consummation of philosophy” (哲学の終結) (Complete Works, vol. 1, p. 6).1 Though Nishida did not explicitly deal with the topic for many years, religion made a comeback in his late years, becoming the theme of his last published essay, The Logic of Logos and the Religious Worldview (Bashoteki (...) ronri to shūkyōteki sekaikan 場所的論理と宗教的世界観) (henceforth LLRW).2 In these two essays on religion, written respectively at the beginning and at the very end of Nishida’s philosophical career, one can find explicit references to mysticism, which .. (shrink)

German universities come under fire: in contemporary political discourse they are considered to be antiquated, inefficient and unfit for international competition. Accordingly, the German government implemented an extensive program of reforms. Following the so‐called ‘Sorbonne Declaration’, the universities shall become part of an European higher education system with comparable and compatible structures. With the focus on the field of academic teaching and learning, this essay discusses the way of defining these activities in a new, entrepreneurial way, and the implications of (...) this process within the university. The reflections lead to the thesis that the actual reforms ask for new forms of critique, because the neoliberal offer of marketable ways to teach and to learn makes the enduring asymmetry of power relations within the educational field invisible, endangers the democratic character of the university and trivializes education. (shrink)

In recent years, the decent work agenda has called upon vocational psychologists to advance psychological research and intervention to promote work as a human right. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic is having disproportionate consequences on vulnerable workers, such as unemployment and underemployment, highlighting the need to enhance access to decent work for these workers. As a response, the present perspective article advances job crafting as a promising way to shape decent work for marginalized workers. To this end, the article deals with (...) decent work and job crafting, starting with the definition of decent work according to the psychology of working theory and examining the evolution of the construct of job crafting. Subsequently, the literature on job crafting is discussed, focusing on variables related to the PWT model of decent work and their effect on vulnerable workers. Finally, possibilities for further research and intervention aimed at promoting decent work through job crafting are discussed. (shrink)

Weiss, Propen, and Reid gather a diverse group of scholars to analyze the growing obsolescence of the human-object dichotomy in today's world. In doing so, Design, Mediation, and the Posthuman brings together diverse disciplines to foster a dialog on significant technological issues pertinent to philosophy, rhetoric, aesthetics, and science.

First published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

The present paper analyses discursive representations and standpoint-arguments pairs, realized in articles of four mainstream Italian newspapers that report on migrants’ and refugees’ mobilization at the perceived peak of the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. We draw on the scholarly agenda of Critical Discourse Studies, employing tools from corpus linguistic perspectives, which allow us to generalize over the way in which the relevant minorities are represented in our corpus. Then, focusing on a smaller sample of negative representations, we outline a methodological synthesis (...) in order to scrutinize instances of representational meaning in newspapers articles and trace what is argumentatively inferred in discursive representations. To that end we exploit tools from systemic functional and cognitive linguistics as well as the Argumentum Model of Topics for the analysis of inference. In this sense, we demonstrate how discriminatory representations do not only portray migrants and refugees in a negative light but also justify discrimination through the argumentative dynamic they develop. (shrink)

Freedom is the least discussed thesis of Descartes' works. Two major issues are: (i) the Fourth Meditation is seen as an unfounded theodicy, an interlude, an interruption to the analytic order; (ii)some passages in Descartes' other works are seen as inconsistent with the Fourth Meditation. First, I argue that Descartes' treatment is philosophical, that freedom underlies his entire philosophical project, defending the indispensability of the Fourth to his metaphysics.I demonstrate that Descartes' conception of freedom differs from the mainstream conceptions, in (...) particular it admits of degrees of higher or lower quality or worth. The latter is connected with indifference, error and sin. The former with spontaneity, truth and goodness. I argue that autonomy and spontaneity are a sine qua non of freedom of highest grade. Secondly, I offer a solution to two problematic passages: Principles I 37, and the notorious letter to Mesland, drawing on Descartes' conception of freedom as the greatest good, on the internal relation between reason and freedom, and demonstrating that there is no inconsistency. Descartes' treatment and indispensability of freedom gives his conception a certain sublimity, and his conception of man a certain serenity: an autonomous rational human being irreducibly and substantially real. (shrink)

The theoretical construct of functional reference is the main tool used by animal communication researchers to explore how animals refer to the world in the absence of a language. Functionally referential signals are commonly defined as signals elicited by a specific class of stimuli and capable of causing behaviors adaptive to such stimuli in the absence of contextual cues. I will argue that this definition is conceptually flawed and propose an alternative definition according to which signals can functionally refer to (...) things that rarely cause them while relying on the essential contribution of contextual cues. (shrink)

This paper outlines a truth-conditional view of logical form, that is, a view according to which logical form is essentially a matter of truth-conditions. The main motivation for the view is a fact that seems crucial to logic. As _§_1 suggests, fundamental logical relations such as entailment or contradiction can formally be explained only if truth-conditions are formally represented.§2 spells out the view. _§_3 dwells on its anity with a conception of logical form that has been defended in the past. (...) _§§_4-6 draw attention to its impact on three major issues that concern, respectively, the extension of the domain of formal explanation, the semantics of tensed discourse, and the analysis of quantication. (shrink)